True Crime Business

In Fool Me Once, renowned expert Kelly Richmond Pope shows fraud in action, uncovering what makes perps tick, victims so gullible, and whistleblowers so morally righteous, while also encouraging us to look at our own behaviors and motivations in the hopes of protecting ourselves and our companies.

By the time you finish this book, you'll have a better understanding of—and perhaps more compassion for—perpetrators; a renewed connection to victims; and an appreciation for those who blow the whistle.

Award-winning investigative journalist and contributing Wired editor Scott Carney leads listeners on a breathtaking journey through the macabre underworld of the global body bazaar, where organs, bones, and even live people are bought and sold on The Red Market. The Red Market sheds a blazing new light on the disturbing, billion-dollar business of trading in human body parts, bodies, and child trafficking, raising issues and exposing corruptions almost too bizarre and shocking to imagine.

On the morning of March 27, 1995, four quick shots cracked through Milan’s elegant streets. Maurizio Gucci, heir to the fabulous fashion dynasty, had been ambushed, slain on the steps to his office by an unknown gunman. Two years later, Milan’s chief of police entered the sumptuous palazzo of Maurizio’s ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani - nicknamed “the Black Widow” by the press - and arrested her for the murder. Did Patrizia kill her ex-husband because his spending was wildly out of control? Or is it possible Patrizia didn’t do it at all?

Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed "too big to fail" to almost every large corporation in America - to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club - an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs - explains why.

When Bill Bratton became a Boston street cop after his return from serving in Vietnam, he was dismayed by the corrupt old guard, and it is fair to say the old guard was dismayed by him, too. But his success fighting crime could not be denied. Propelled by extraordinary results, Bratton had a dazzling rise, and ultimately a dazzling career, becoming the most famous police commissioner of modern times. The Profession is the story of that career in full.

Blowback is a non-fiction, first-person memoir about the unintended consequences of failed workplace ethics. Blowback, a prequel to Whistleblower (Bay Tree Publishing, 2010) is based on real events that took place before the whistle was blown. Faculty member, scientist, and educator Amy Block Joy loved her job at the University of California, Davis. For two decades, she administered a highly successful, multi-million-dollar poverty program that provided training to thousands of Californians who needed it most. Working diligently to enforce the federal, state, and university rules, she was ...

In Catch Me if You Can, Frank W. Abagnale recounted his youthful career as a master imposter and forger. In The Art of the Steal, Abagnale tells the remarkable story of how he parlayed his knowledge of cons and scams into a successful career as a consultant on preventing financial foul play—while showing you how to identify and outsmart perpetrators of fraud.

Born into one of America's most illustrious trading families, Sam Israel was determined to strike out on his own. After apprenticing with one of the greatest traders of the 1980s, he founded his own fast-growing hedge fund, promising investors extraordinary returns. But it was all an elaborate charade.

For more than 60 years, Southern Californians entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the Sconce family's Lamb Funeral Home. But the heirs to the fourth-generation funeral empire betrayed that trust with a series of gruesome crimes against the dead. Featured on ABC-TV's Nightline.

Step into the gripping, electrifying narrative of 3X World Champ, the true story of a three-time kickboxing champion whose life took a wild turn into the shadowy world of marijuana smuggling. Set against the backdrop of 1980s Miami—a time of glitz, glamour, and organized crime—this memoir unveils the astonishing career of Thaddeus J. "Ted" Pryor.

The story of Luigi Ronsisvalle is an intimate look at the life of a professional killer. It is, in some ways, the story of all workingmen and women with ambition who never achieve their ultimate goal. But what makes Luigi unique is that, for him to achieve his goal, people had to die. His ambition, from when he was twelve years old, was to be a made man in the Mafia. He once told a presidential commission, "American child falls in love with baseball, I fall in love with Mafia."

In the world of high finance, multibillion-dollar Wall Street banks greedily guard their secrets. Enter Robert Kerbeck, a working actor who made his real money lying on the phone, charming people into revealing their employers’ most valuable information. In this exhilarating memoir that will appeal to fans of The Wolf of Wall Street and Catch Me If You Can, unsuspecting receptionists, assistants, and bigshot executives all fall victim to “the Ruse.”

Learn about investment traps with an insight into fraudulent Ponzi Schemes with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. A Ponzi scheme is an illegal business practice. Investors are recruited into a Ponzi scheme and offered excellent returns over time for little or no risk. The operator of a Ponzi scheme relies on further recruitment of investors to accumulate funds. Earlier investors are repaid with later investor's money. They have also been described as Pyramid Schemes.

Rarely does a week go by without a well-known executive being indicted for engaging in a white-collar crime. Perplexed as to what drives successful, wealthy people to risk it all, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes spent seven years in the company of the men behind the largest corporate crimes in history - from the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the Ponzi schemers Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford.

In December 2008, the world watched as master financier Bernard L. Madoff was taken away from his posh Manhattan apartment in handcuffs, accused of swindling thousands of innocent victims - including friends and family - out of billions of dollars in the world's largest Ponzi scheme. Madoff went to jail; he will spend the rest of his life there. But what happened to his devoted wife and sons?

In this disquieting cyber thriller, Joseph Menn takes readers into the murky hacker underground, traveling the globe from San Francisco to Costa Rica and London to Russia. His guides are California surfer and computer whiz Barrett Lyon and a fearless British high-tech agent. Through these heroes, Menn shows the evolution of cyber-crime from small-time thieving to sophisticated, organized gangs, who began by attacking corporate websites but increasingly steal financial data from consumers.

On May 6, 2010, financial markets around the world tumbled simultaneously and without warning. In the span of five minutes, a trillion dollars of valuation was lost. The Flash Crash, as it became known, represented the fastest drop in market history. When share values rebounded less than half an hour later, experts around the globe were left perplexed. A real-life financial thriller, Flash Crash uncovers the remarkable, behind-the-scenes narrative of a mystifying market crash, a globe-spanning investigation into international fraud, and the man at the center of them both.

At the height of the roaring 20s, Swedish émigré Ivar Kreuger made a fortune raising money in America and loaning it to Europe in exchange for matchstick monopolies. His enterprise was a rare success story throughout the Great Depression. Yet after Kreuger's suicide in 1932, the true nature of his empire emerged.

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement want to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media want a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama, drop by bloody drop, in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, and even then break them or find ways to work loopholes into them.

This account describes how a 28-year-old from Watford, Nick Leeson, plunged Barings Bank into ruin. In 1994, Leeson seemed to be making the company millions of pounds a week, but he explains how the cover-up of a colleague's small error led to the crash of Britain's oldest merchant bank.